ESI Maya 22 USB

I bought this box to be able take it with me while travelling, both for good quality listening to audio via my laptop and making basic recordings just with one mic. The Maya works well on both counts. The unit is small and light enough to fit in my laptop case, and seems compact and strong enough to withstand some abuse--the only weak point being the Phantom power button, so best to buy a small camera pouch for it or something. The recording quality is excellent, almost indistinguishable from that of the Echo AudioFire professional soundcard I have in my studio, as is playback via the jack line-outputs. Strangely, the sound quality of the headphone output is noticeably less rich, but still acceptable.

Installation of the software was easy, and at this price and size one needs to take the lack of a hardware volume button in one's stride. I use a PC with W7 and the only drawback is that the software programming does not appear to be well thought-out in that the control panel is impossible to close, even when the Maya is unplugged. The only way to get rid of the control panel is to untick it in msconfig > startup and restart the computer. But when reconnecting the Maya the control panel is not automatically reactivated. A quick search found the .exe file in the Systems 32 folder, from where I made a shortcut to my desktop, to manually reactivate it when necessary.